Critical Thinking in The Age of AI

With AI-generated content everywhere, convincing, polished, and often dead wrong, students need more than digital literacy. They need intellectual grit. They need the tools to question, to evaluate, to not fall for the first thing that sounds authoritative. They need the skills of AI.

What Is Critical Thinking?

We’ll start with two foundational definitions:

• John Dewey (1933) described it as “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (p. 9).
• Robert Ennis (2015) called it “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do” (p. 32).

Dewey gives us the process, slow down, don’t react, think. Ennis gives us the goal, make decisions worth standing behind.

Why Critical Thinking Matters?

Here’s the short list. Critical thinking:

• Protects us from manipulation
• Improves decision-making
• Helps us challenge assumptions
• Makes us better citizens
• Sharpens our learning
• And especially now helps us spot misinformation, disinformation, and outright nonsense

Ennis’s Critical Thinking Dispositions (2015, p. 32)

Ennis (2015, 32) outlines 12 key dispositions. These are habits of mind. They reflect a willingness to think carefully and fairly:

1. Seek and offer clear statements of the question
2. Seek and offer clear reasons
3. Try to be well-informed
4. Use credible sources—and name them
5. Take the total situation into account
6. Stay focused on the central concern
7. Be alert for alternatives
8. Be open-minded—seriously consider other views and withhold judgment when needed
9. Take a position when the evidence supports it—and change it if needed
10. Seek appropriate precision
11. Try to “get it right” to the extent possible
12. Employ your critical thinking skills—use them, don’t just learn them

If you’re teaching CT and skipping dispositions, you’re only doing half the job. Skills without the will to use them don’t get you far.

Ennis’s Critical Thinking Skills (2015, pp. 32–33)

Here’s the skill set. These are the intellectual moves students need to practice not just learn about:

• Have a focus and pursue it
• Analyze arguments
• Ask and answer clarification questions
• Understand and use graphs and math
• Judge source credibility
• Observe and judge observation reports
• Use background knowledge and situational context
• Deduce and judge deductions
• Make and judge inductive inferences
• Make and judge value judgments
• Define terms and evaluate definitions
• Handle ambiguity and equivocation
• Attribute and evaluate unstated assumptions
• Think suppositionally
• Recognize and deal with fallacies

Not all of these need to be introduced at once. But they should be scaffolded, modeled, and used regularly in student work.

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The Paul & Elder Framework: Elements of Thought

Here’s the other piece I use with students: Paul and Elder’s Elements of Thought. It’s deceptively simple: eight elements that show up every time we think critically (or fail to):

“Whenever we think, we think for a purpose within a point of view, based on assumptions that lead to implications and consequences. We use concepts, ideas, and theories to interpret data, facts, and experiences in order to answer questions, solve problems, and resolve issues.”
(Paul & Elder, 2014, p. 14)

Let me break those down:

• Purpose: What are you trying to achieve with your thinking?
• Question: What are you trying to figure out?
• Information: What data or evidence are you using? Reliable?
• Inferences: What conclusions are you drawing?
• Concepts: What theories or frameworks are shaping your thinking?
• Assumptions: What are you taking for granted?
• Implications: If you’re right, what follows?
• Point of View: From what perspective are you seeing this?

Students don’t need to memorize this. But they need to start asking these questions, and hearing them asked, in the classroom.

Final Thoughts

James Paul Gee once warned about the “culture of amateurism” created by Web 2.0. AI is accelerating that. Now, anyone can produce content that looks polished and persuasive with no expertise, no accountability, and no truth-checking. This is why we teach critical thinking. This is why we must integrate it across the curriculum. I created the visual below to help you get started, use it, adapt it, share it. And follow the references if you want to go deeper.

Because teaching students how to think—not what to think—is still our best defense.

References

• Ennis, R. H. (2015). Critical thinking: A streamlined conception. In M. Davies & R. Barnett (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of critical thinking in higher education (pp. 31–47). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Dewey, J. (1933). How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. D.C. Heath and Company.
• Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2014). The miniature guide to critical thinking concepts and tools (8th ed.). Foundation for Critical Thinking.